Why it is important to maintain corporate standardisation in the age of mobility

As business needs continue to expand and embrace flexible working, many companies have come to accept that different devices are required to meet the varying needs of different employees, from the execs, to the sales team and office workers.

This poses a few challenges for IT professionals. As the number of models increases to meet user requirements, it becomes increasingly difficult to provide high-level support at a reasonable cost to a growing portfolio. This typically results in a segmented and costly support model. In order to streamline the IT support team’s role and increase efficiency, IT pros have to make the wider business case for standardisation.

There is a misconception that large organisations have endless resources, when in fact they are looking for value like everyone else. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group faced this challenge as a result of having a large workforce with diverse skills. Engineers require raw power and high performance, while executives demand lightweight and convenience for extensive travel. Additionally, the sales force needs enough power to create and give presentations effectively, with the durability to withstand their busy road schedules.

When looking for a laptop to standardise computer usage across the company, there are a number of factors to consider. First and foremost, users look for a laptop which is light, powerful and durable, to promote a flexible working environment whilst ensuring the same high powered processing whether the employee is at home, on the move, or in the office. The back-office benefits for the IT department are important. System administrators can produce one software image instead of several for an ever increasing number of laptops. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group opted for an HP EliteBook 745, which enabled them to consolidate from six PC models to just three standard models. The powerful AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) with AMD Radeon graphics ensured high-end performance for users in all areas of the company.

High performance Accelerated Processing Units, such as the AMD PRO A-Series, help drive productivity and collaboration in business by not only addressing the current needs of the workforce, but by offering new avenues for innovative working. When choosing a laptop for standardisation, at the very least end-users expect to be able to run apps, edit documents, video conference and surf the Web all at once without slowing down. Opting for a processor which has HSA technology is highly effective, as it maximises the performance of the laptop by enabling intelligent prioritisation of system tasks between GPU (parallel processing) and CPU (serial processing) by routing to the appropriate processor.

Crucially, promoting standardisation is a great opportunity to improve the quality of working life for employees and has the option to increase the mobility of the workforce. By choosing the right business-class laptop and by keeping hardware consistent, IT departments’ end users have fewer compatibility concerns. As a result of standardisation, IT departments have a more simplified infrastructure to support and fewer issues in the user base to deal with resulting in cost efficiencies of management and a happier end user.